Lesser Evils

by Joe Flanagan

  He heard Garrity open and close a drawer out at the sergeant’s desk. Garrity was obsequious and servile in a way that seemed an intentional parody of servitude. He regretted the day that Jane Myrna brought Little Mike in after he’d wet his pants. Garrity had seen it and Warren suspected he would spread it around the department.

  And now, as if summoned by thoughts of him, the sergeant came knocking on the office door, a light rap, rap, rap that was like a wisecrack in itself. Warren looked up and saw his face in the opening, his head slightly bowed in deference, his eyebrows up a little, like a butler in possession of household secrets. “Sir,” he said.

  Warren waited.

  “We got a call from Kalmus Beach. There’s a body in the reeds.”

  Warren grabbed his radio and stood up.

  “It’s a kid,” the sergeant said.

  Warren walked quickly down the corridor, trying to raise Ed Jenkins on the radio. He pushed the doors open and walked down the steps to the small lot at the side of the building.

  Jenkins’s voice came up as Warren was opening the door to his unmarked.

  “Have you got a crowd there?” Warren asked.

  “Not yet. We’re keeping them off.”

  “This is a kid?”

  “Affirmative. A boy. About seven, eight years old.”

  “Is the coroner there?”

  “We’ve called him.”

  “Give me about five minutes.”

  Warren turned down Ocean Street, which was a long, straight run from the center of town to the water, ending at Kalmus Beach. He crossed Main Street and passed the Hyannis Theater, a large gable-roofed structure with a marquee advertising The Amazing Colossal Man, and below that, the names of the leads, Glenn Langan and Cathy Downs.

  From the intersection with Main Street, the road began to run downhill. There were a few big ramshackle houses with hydrangeas and American flags flying. Then the docks appeared on the left. As Ocean Street approached Kalmus Beach, the land turned completely to marsh, and during low tide, the smell could be overpowering.

  As Warren slowed, he looked to his left and saw a cluster of people on the far side of the parking lot where there was a wall of dense brown reeds. A local drunk named Bernard Suggs was standing some distance away from the crowd with Ed Jenkins.

  Warren parked and walked over to Jenkins, who turned to Suggs and said, “Stay put, Bernard. Don’t go anywhere.” The detective went over to the edge of the reeds where a well-worn pathway began. Warren followed.

  “We’ve got a dead kid,” Jenkins said. “He’s in there about thirty yards in. Looks like he’s been strangled. Bernard here found him. He says he was coming in here with a bottle to drink and lay up for a while. And then he comes across this kid laying there.”

  Warren motioned to one of the patrolmen standing thirty feet away.

  “The kid’s been sexually molested, looks like,” Jenkins said.

  When the patrolman reached them, Warren said, “I want you to stay here with this Suggs fellow. Make sure he doesn’t go anywhere.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Warren walked past Jenkins and into the reeds. “All right,” he said.

  The reeds comprised an area of a few acres of a particular species of woody stalk that had expanded into an empire of dense growth. Reaching a height of ten feet and growing as closely as bamboo, they were a formidable mass. The reeds were irresistible to any child who encountered them, the well-established maze of footpaths that ran through them fantastic and foreboding. They doubled back on themselves, split into twos and threes at mysterious junctions, and opened into unexpected clearings where there were sometimes signs of a campfire or a clandestine gathering of some kind. Beer cans and liquor bottles were strewn throughout.

  Warren walked in front of Jenkins, their feet making soft, crushing sounds on the ground. The light within the reeds was like that of a greenhouse, silvery and lunar, giving no indication of weather or time of day. “It’s up ahead, where the trail heads off to the right,” Jenkins said. They came out in a clearing about twelve feet across. A small boy lay there on his back, his arms flung out to the sides. He was naked except for a pair of swim trunks around one ankle and his legs were spread apart in a diamond shape, the soles of the feet nearly touching, the knees far apart. Warren stopped a good distance from the body and looked. Two paths entered the clearing from the opposite side.

  “Who’s been in here so far?” he asked.

  “Me, Bernard, and couple of lifeguards.”

  “Anybody touch the body?”

  “I did, to check the temperature. One of the lifeguards checked for a pulse.”

  “They didn’t move him?”

  “They tell me no.”

  “And he’s confirmed DOA, right?” Warren still hadn’t taken his eyes off the boy.

  “He’s dead, lieutenant.”

  Warren walked over to the body and stood by the feet. The scrotum and the flesh above his genitals had been torn and stood up in several small jagged flaps. Insects were circling above his hairless skin, settling on the little wounds. The clearing was very quiet.

  Jenkins said, “He’s got those superficial punctures in the genital area, which . . . I don’t know what they are.”

  Warren knelt and leaned over the body. He was aware of his refusal to look at the face. The wounds in the scrotum and pubis looked like bite marks in places and he didn’t know whether it was modesty or disbelief that kept him from saying it. He crouched back on his heels and looked the rest of the body over. Someone had grabbed the boy’s face forcefully, the neck and wrists, too.

  “No evidence on the ground?”

  “None that I’ve seen yet. Everything is just like we found it.”

  Warren stood up. “Shit.” Jenkins looked taken aback by the expletive. “Suggs says he just came in here to drink and stumbled on this?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I don’t make Bernard for a killer of little boys.”

  “But you never know.”

  “Right.”

  “I want to get a blood sample from him.”

  Jenkins said, “I don’t like to bring this up, lieutenant, but before we spend any time investigating this, we might want to call Elliott Yost. He’s probably going to want to give it to the state police.”

  “We’re first responders. We got the call. If he wants the state to take it over . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. “We should give it everything. Then they’ll have something to work with when they do take it.”

  “He’d probably want them here now to do the crime scene.”

  “Well, they’re not here now.”

  A patrolman stationed out in the parking lot radioed that Detective Dunleavy and the coroner had arrived. Soon, Warren and Jenkins heard them making their way through the reeds. Jenkins said, “I’m going to make sure they can find us.”

  Jenkins went back up the path. Warren heard voices from out of the reeds as Jenkins met the others and they exchanged information. A minute later, Dunleavy emerged into the clearing, followed by a short, weathered man in his late fifties who wore a white short-sleeved shirt with a tie and a straw fedora. He carried a bulky black case and had a camera hung around his neck. Dunleavy said little. He stood next to Warren for a moment, looking at the body, then walked around it in a circle, staying close to the wall of reeds that surrounded the clearing, his eyes scanning the ground. Jack Dowd, the coroner, put his case down and wound his camera. Dunleavy circled back around to Warren’s side. “Any reports of a missing person?” he asked. “Because this isn’t the Gilbride kid.”

  “Not so far.”

  The coroner began snapping pictures.

  Dunleavy said, “This is bad. This is a bad one.”

  “What do you make of those cuts?”

>   “Bites. See that little arc by the left part of the groin? Little dotted lines. Those are teeth marks. They’re turning purple now. You should be able to see them real clear in another hour or so.”

  Dowd knelt down and shot close-ups of the injuries to the boy’s genital area. When he was finished he laid his camera on the ground and opened his case. He took out a long, slender needlelike device. Warren knew he was about to push it deep into the boy’s midsection so he could read the core body temperature and determine the time of death. Warren did not want to see it. He went back out through the path and when he came out at the edge of the parking lot, there were many more people gathered than before. Ed Jenkins had Bernard Suggs backed up against one of the cruisers, asking him questions. Warren walked over and heard Suggs saying, “I didn’t do it, man. I didn’t do it. I had nothing to do with this.”

  “So what were you doing in there, again?”

  “I was goin’ in there to drink.” He pulled a pint of Muscatel out of his pants pocket and showed it to the policeman. “I was just goin’ in there to drink, Officer Warren, that’s it. Just drink and sleep. That’s what I do.”

  “Put the bottle on the car,” Jenkins said. “Turn around and put your hands there on the hood.” He started going through Suggs’s pockets. For a moment the man looked like he was about to cry.

  “You don’t think I did it, do you?”

  “Not right now I don’t.”

  Suggs seemed relieved for a moment, and then appeared to be considering the answer further. “But you might think I did it later?”

  Jenkins made no response.

  “Man, I go out to the airport and sleep, you know that, right? I go out to the airport and get drunk, lay in the woods. I go out behind Buckler’s Salvage, I lay up off Mary Dunn Road with those boys up there sometimes, but I never . . .”

  “Shut up, Bernard.”

  “I’m just tellin’ ya . . .”

  “You’re all right for now.”

  “Whoever did that is going to the gas chamber, right?”

  “Whoever did that is the reason they made the gas chamber in the first place.”

  Jenkins finished searching Suggs’s pockets and allowed him to turn around. “Let me see your hands.”

  Suggs reluctantly held them up, long, knobby fingers, weathered, with black dirt worked deep into the cracks in the skin. Jenkins stepped up to look. There were no abrasions or broken nails or anything to suggest he’d been in a struggle. Warren opened the rear door to his cruiser. “Get in. We’re going to take a blood sample from you.”

  Suggs sank slowly into the backseat and drew his feet in after him. Warren turned to Jenkins. “Somebody took that kid into the reeds two or three hours ago. Someone had to have seen him.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  “I want a check on all known perverts. Check our own list and anything we can get from the state police.”

  7

  The boy was nine-year-old Stanley Lefgren, who lived a half mile from the beach. Warren spent a grueling hour with the family after the discovery of the body. The mother was unable to speak. She remained enclosed in a bedroom with the boy’s three siblings. Periodic screams reached Warren where he sat on the porch with the father, who spoke through copious tears as if drugged.

  When Warren returned from the Lefgrens’, he found a chaotic scene at the police station. The eight-to-four shift had been called in off the street for briefing and reporters loitered on the steps outside. Dunleavy had gone to the morgue to examine the body with the coroner. The hyoid bones in the boy’s throat were fractured and he had petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes, confirming strangulation as the cause of death. Officers were checking the whereabouts of a half dozen known local sex offenders and had corroborated alibis for half of them. The records and identification division of the Massachusetts state police was sending down a list of known deviants along with last known addresses.

  Three men—one of them quite elderly—were standing in the corridor, each with his back against the wall and each a good ten paces away from the others. They either stared at the floor or gazed at the wall opposite them, but they did not acknowledge one another.

  Warren caught Dunleavy coming out of his office. “Who are these guys?” he said. Dunleavy motioned for the lieutenant to accompany him further down the corridor, out of earshot. They stopped by Warren’s office door. Dunleavy took a note-pad out of his jacket pocket and consulted its pages. “James Frawley. That’s the large individual farthest away from us who looks like he’s been living outside. Some kids saw him hanging around the pond behind the Hyannis elementary school. They said he was trying to talk to them and they came home and told their parents. One of the mothers called. Frawley’s a transient. No job. Stays at a shelter run by the Salvation Army. We’ve confirmed that with them. He’s got a state unemployment card with a name on it but no other ID.

  “Edgar Cleve. The guy in the middle. We got a call from someone on Daisy Bluffs Road who said he was wandering around the neighborhood over there. That’s not far from the beach. There’s a lot of young families there, and lots of kids, too. Anyway, he says he’s a courier for a medical lab. I’ve got Garrity checking on it. The guy says he was there to pick up some specimens or something and it was going to take some time for them to get everything together so he walked over to check on this place he’s interested in renting.

  “The old guy is Jasper Matsov. One of our patrolmen spotted him sitting in his car in the picnic area at Veterans Beach. He’s retired and lives in Falmouth but that’s all we know.”

  Warren glanced at Dunleavy’s notes and pointed at Frawley’s name. “Bring him in here.”

  Dunleavy called the man and he left his position by the wall and approached them, scratching the back of his neck. “Go inside and sit down,” Dunleavy said, and opened the door to Warren’s office. They questioned Frawley, who, while timid, managed nonetheless to emanate a bitter resentment. “What were you doing down at the pond?” Warren asked. “By the elementary school?”

  “I was fishing.” He moved his head in Dunleavy’s direction. “They seen my pole and my bucket.”

  Warren looked at Dunleavy, who gave a slight nod.

  “Why were you trying to talk to the kids?”

  “They were just there. All’s I did was say hello, that’s all.”

  Frawley claimed he was nowhere near Kalmus Beach, in fact had never been there at all. He spent his time either at the shelter, trying to find work, or looking for food. The conversation was circular, their attempts at exposing incriminating facts about James Frawley thwarted by his readiness to admit them, though the facts—drinking, vagrancy, theft, nonpayment of child support—were not what they were after. His account of his activities and whereabouts described the same dire routine every time they tried to catch him out.

  Dunleavy held Frawley’s unemployment card in his fingertips and watched him silently. “Is that your real name? James Frawley?”

  “Yes, it’s my real name.”

  Dunleavy’s eyes went back to the card, then back to Frawley. Warren knew the detective was getting ready to go to work and got up to leave him alone. As he closed the door behind him, he heard the detective say, “Come on. What’s your real name?”

  Warren opened the door to the office that Jenkins and Dunleavy shared. Jenkins was questioning Edgar Cleve. He was tall and gangly, with large hands like paddles that he held flat on his knees as if they were instruments with which he was unfamiliar. He had big doe-like eyes and high cheekbones. His oversized front teeth and their bony substructure stood out on his face like a separate feature, giving him a slightly simian appearance. It was no wonder, Warren thought, that someone reported him. Jenkins was saying, “Have you ever been arrested before?”

  “Mm—no.”

  “What were you doing on Daisy Bluffs Road?” Warren asked.

  �
��I already told him,” Cleve said, motioning to Jenkins. “I was picking up from the oncologists and I was waiting for some tissue samples. They said it was going to be another twenty minutes so I walked over to look at this place that’s for rent.”

  Jenkins said, “Why didn’t you just drive over there?”

  “It’s real close by the lab. Besides, I’m in the car all day.”

  Jenkins handed Cleve’s driver’s license to Warren. “How long have you been a resident of the state of Massachusetts?” the detective asked.

  “Too long, apparently.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Cleve lifted one of his big hands in an awkward, waving motion. “My living situation. It’s a problem.” He looked at the detective and then over at Warren as if he expected them to indulge him in a conversation about his domestic arrangement. “Anyway. That’s why I was over there looking at the rental.”

  Garrity poked his head in the door and glanced from Jenkins to Warren. Warren came outside. “I just spoke with Bondurant Labs,” the sergeant said. “They say he works for them and that the oncology office is on his route.”

  Down the hall, Warren’s office door opened, and James Frawley came out, followed by Dunleavy. The detective joined Warren and Garrity. “Frawley’s got a story and he’s sticking to it.”

  “Keep an eye on him,” said Warren. “Go down to the Salvation Army and see what they can tell you about him. Search the registry of motor vehicle records, corrections, social services, everything.”

  “Jenkins talking to the other guy, Cleve?” Dunleavy asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How’s he look?”

  “About the same as your guy.”

  Dunleavy said, “You get any hits on any of them yet, Garrity?”

  “Not yet. But it turns out we know Matsov. He’s an old queer from way back.”

  “What was he doing down at Veterans Beach?” asked Warren.

  “He’s not saying. But we arrested him a few years ago for lewd conduct over at Hathaway’s Pond.”

  Warren glanced over his shoulder at Matsov. “Tell him to stay the hell away from the beaches. I want fingerprints from all three of them. Photographs, too.”